TERAVoice supports both TAPI and CAPI based
telephony hardware as well as voice modems and
several CAPI based VoIP stacks.

Detailed Information about compatible
brands and devices can be found on ourHardware Compatibility
List. The following sections provide
some general information about different types
of hardware.

TAPI-Hardware

Basically any hardware is supported that is
delivered with a TAPI-driver which supports
audio playback and record. Some TERAVoice
advanced features (e.g. call transfer) are
dependent on appropriate hardware-support. If
the driver does not implement a certain feature
it won't be available with TERAVoice as well.
Nevertheless not all kind of hardware is very
well suited for operation with a telephony
server system.

CAPI-Hardware

Especially European based telephony is
usually built on CAPI. (www.capi.org).
TERAVoice supports most CAPI 2.0 based hardware
from n*BRI (S0, 2 lines) to n*PRI (E1 or T1,
24/30 lines).

CAPI based VoIP stacks

TERAVoice supports some CAPI based VoIP
stacks which can be used to answer H.323 or SIP
calls. The builtin support for H.323 in
TERAVoice only supports bridging calls to H.323
terminals but does not allow to answer voice
over IP calls for other tasks. This will change
in a future version.

Voice Modems

While a voice-modem might be perfectly
sufficient for small and simple voicemail
configurations, several drawbacks exist:
Audio-Quality and stability of audio
communications is rather poor with some
voice-modems. Voice modems often have difficulty
in determining when a line is hung up, resulting
in the line being blocked and messages recorded
until the maximum recording time has been
reached. Sometimes recognition of DTMF tones
does not work correctly and call transfer is not
supported for voice-modems, since the Unimodem
driver does not support call-transfer.

Example 2: IVR-solution on ISDN PRI with
Scripts or ActiveX objects where no mailbox
assignment is needed.

Basically all working combinations of
telephony hardware and PBX systems can be used
with TERAVoice. There are basically 3 features
that are PBX-dependant:

Mailbox-Assignment: The telephony server is
usually connected to certain PBX ports and
assigned the appropriate extensions. When a user
redirects his phone to the mailbox via explicit
redirection (set on the phone) or implicit
redirection (e.g. with ringing groups set in the
PBX) the call gets signaled to the telephony
server. There are several ways how the telephony
server can get informed about the source of the
redirection in order to know which mailbox to
choose:

Inband signaling via DTMF tones: This method
is commonly used with analog networks. A
code of DTMF tones is signaled during the
first 1 or 2 seconds after the call gets
connected to the telephony server.TERAVoice
provides full support for these method with
configurable DTMF code patterns

Redirector
information: In ISDN systems the number of
the redirecting party is often transferred
as ISDN redirector info. TERAVoice can use
this info to select the corresponding
mailbox

For PBX systems without redirector
information or ISDN hardware connected to a
public ISDN network that does not transmit
redirector information, TERAVoice also
offers MSN routing. The telephony must be
assigned one additional MSN for each mailbox
so that every user can redirect his phone to
the corresponding MSN. The telephony server
can select the corresponding mailbox
depending on this MSN then

Additionally
TERAVoice supports mailbox assignment
depending on the hardware device. If you are
using more than one device or your
multi-line device can report several virtual
devices, you can also use device-dependant
mailbox-assignment

For each mailbox TERAVoice supports multiple
entries of any combination of these options.
This is extremely useful in a mixed environment
with analog and digital telephony networks or
different hardware.

Please note: Some PBX systems allow mailbox
assignment with a custom protocol over a serial
connection between server and PBX. TERAVoice
does not currently support this option.

The goal of unified messaging systems is to
target all communications into a single inbox.
TERAVoice does not require a special kind of
messaging system and thus it is completely up to
the customer to decide which system to choose or
simply use TERAVoice with an existing messaging
system.

Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange
is one of the most wide spread corporate
messaging systems all over the world. TERAVoice
perfectly works in combination with MS Exchange
2000 or previous versions (with Internet Mail
connector). One common procedure in combination
with TERAVoice is the use of Public Folders'
e-mail addresses as target for voice messages in
order to allow collaborative access to new voice
messages or use the call info message for
creating log-files of calls.

Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes is similar
to Exchange. By interfacing with the Lotus SMTP
interfaces all TERAVoice messages are
efficiently transferred to their recipients.

Other Messaging Systems

Nearly all
concurrent messaging systems or mail servers are
capable of transmitting internet e-mails via
SMTP. Through its use of SMTP, TERAVoice is able
to communicate with virtually any mail system.

A drawback exists for configurations that are
using an external mail server system with low
bandwidth internet connections. While these
configurations are still possible, this setup is
obviously not very efficient, since all voice
messages would have to pass the internet network
connection at least two times.

Summary

TERAVoice is one
of the most flexible telephony server systems on
the market. With its unprecedented support for
TAPI and CAPI in a single product TERAVoice
integrates into a broad range of
environments.TERAVoice is one of the very few
Telephony servers that offer a free version for
download, so customers can be sure that the
system will work within their hardware
configuration and provides the desired features.